I am really enjoying my fall semester so far, and I especially love all of the classes that I am taking- they challenge me so that I can grow as an artist, but I also feel as though I am genuinely enjoying the projects. My General Illustration class is great, and I always feel that with every assignment, I improve. With this project, the goal was to create an illustration that would be on the cover of Time magazine or The New Yorker. We were given articles to read for the Time magazine cover, as typically, the cover art relates to a story that is published within. However, The New Yorker is more free-ranged, and the only criteria is that it is to be an illustration. I felt as if I had more creative freedom when I was sketching my thumbnails for The New Yorker, however, I wanted to challenge myself so I tried doing some for Time magazine as well.

After showing my thumbnails to my professor, he told me to finalize and sketch out one of the thumbnails that I did for The New Yorker. It was one of the images that I sketched out to represent global warming. Honestly, I would put it into better words, but the image is more of an abstract culmination of all the things that my friend has told me, as she is very passionate about trying to stop global warming, and environmental science in general. I took it to Procreate, and although it was only supposed to be a sketch, I really wanted to do a more colored and concrete version because I didn’t know what style I wanted it to be in, and with having other classes, I thought it would be smart to start playing around with those things early.

After I showed the class what I had come up with for the ‘sketch’, it was up to the class to advise me on the direction I should go. My professor advised that I create a bun atop her head as opposed to the squiggly bit of hair that I did, so that it would be more obvious that it was the earth being represented. One of my peers recommended that the flames reach up beyond her backside, because they looked a little awkward only being horizontal. I took my image back into Procreate, and made the appropriate changes. I even used the app’s ‘fire’ brush so that the fire stood out to the viewer a little bit more. I am definitely content with how the finished product came out.